The joys of pandiculation

It's one of my favourite words. "Pandiculation." It's that type of huge yawn where you stretch your arms upwards to the heavens and at the same time stretch out your back and maybe even, on special occasions, your legs too. It's yawning with your entire body.

It's one of those physical pleasures, like scratching an itch, that everyone enjoys. Yawning isn't really about getting in extra oxygen - and there are all kinds of theories about its purpose. But increasingly it's being looked at as a social response, yawning being triggered not by any physical need, but because we're all copycats. When someone else yawns, we yawn.

That goes for animals too. Dogs, who sleep all the time and so aren't even remotely sleep deprived, are always yawning. Researchers have found that what prompts this is hanging around with yawning humans. They're copying us.

Researchers in the United States this week have taken this a step further. Not only are animals inspired to yawn by other creatures, but an experiment wanted to find whether chimpanzees could be made to yawn by a cartoon. Guess what? The chimps watching a cartoon of chimps yawning started to yawn. It's contagious.

Sleeping together

How is it that in adulthood you end up with less personal space than in childhood? I had my own room growing up, now all my stuff is crammed in cupboards that seem to get smaller and more overcrowded every year.

Sharing a bed is part of this grown up life. But a leading sleep researcher, Neil Stanley, says that we should consider the joys of sleeping apart. The British Science Festival heard suggestions that sleep is less likely to be disturbed when couples sleep in separate beds. It might feel as though sleeping together is more comfortable and reassuring, but apparently we end up wrecking each others' shut-eye.

It's interesting how the idea of living together has becomes so associated with sleeping together. Aristocrats in previous centuries would have had their own separate sleeping quarters, there was no assumption that his lordship and her ladyship would have to kip on the same pillow.

It was poor families in cramped houses that were forced to share beds. And sharing a bed didn't necessarily mean anything romantic. Large families were squashed into a single bed, strangers staying at inns might be expected to share a bed. Pepys records sharing a bed with friends who stayed over.

There were also pungent words to describe lots of people sharing a bed or a sleeping place together: "Pigging" and "Chumming."

Heart breaker

As if insomnia wasn't cruel enough a punishment, research from the University of Montreal suggests that the nightly ordeal of the sleepless is also seriously bad for their hearts.

Insomniacs have heightened blood pressure which in turn is linked to long-term damage to the heart. While the blood pressure of good sleepers drops during the night, those poor long-suffering insomniacs have their blood pressure cranked up even higher.

There's nothing more debilitating than that moment when you wake and realise that you're more tired than when you went to sleep. Now the insomniac gets even more bad news.

Sunny Jim

Hats off to the former prime minister, Jim Callaghan. An article in the Daily Mail highlights concerns that the current incumbent, Gordon Brown, isn't getting enough shut-eye. The 24-hour culture of news seems to have pushed political life into a sleepless marathon. Not good for anyone. Better the example of Jim Callaghan who had the good sense to have a sleep each afternoon. According to a former assistant, his catchphrase for such occasions was: "Better well rested than well briefed." What wise words.

'Natural thought of our souls'

There's a great review in the New York Times of an exhibition “To Sleep, Perchance to Dream,” which has opened at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

It reveals the complexities of the way that sleep was seen in the 17th century, not as something functional and rather trivial, but as an uncertain and thought-provoking state. "Sleep should not be thought of casually: it is mysterious, powerful, central, inextricably linked to the world."

This exhibition shows how seriously the men and women of the 17th century took their sleep - recognising that it needed to be attended to as much as their waking hours.

There is a marvellous quote from the 1630s, saying that the wise man "learnes to know himselfe as well by the night's blacke mantle, as the searching beames of day. In sleepe, wee have the naked and naturall thoughts of our soules".

You could sit back and think about that for a long time. While we attach so much status to what we achieve in our work and in our public lives, to what we show other people, it's under night's black mantle that we might see more of our own souls.

There are also some intriguing sleep remedies. There was the old stand-by of poppy, but also lettuce and dormouse blood. Both lettuce and dormice have been associated with sleep forever, they are remarkably persistent associations.

The exhibition runs until the end of May - and there is some information online at http://www.folger.edu.